Pulse Nightclub Massacre

Recognizing the ingrained hate of the queer community, many more stand in solidarity with the victims from today's events. Thousands have turned up to donate blood in order to save the survivors of this fatal attack. The President of the United States, Barack Obama, ordered the flag be flown at half staff in all the US and it's territories, and a solemn timber of grief and awe is the prevailing tone in the media for now. Unlike the UpStairs Lounge Arson, the media and government recognized the significance of the attacker and the victims. The LGBTQ community was not marginalized, they will not be laughed at, as they were in the past. But, as with any event like this, the shock will wear off, we will move on as a nation. The mourners will be forgotten, the dead a cliff note in some column, a bulletin across the bottom of our screens. Questions will be raised never to be answered, and the only way we as a society will remain captivated by the eruption of hate that happened today, this byproduct of dangerous religious and social dilapidation, will be with a new tragedy that carries on where this one will be left off.

This in mind I wager my life, as many others do, with the expectations of normalcy and the fear of attack as I plan to go to Gay Pride in the Twin Cities. I ask will this happen, should I be prepared? The question is a lie, one cannot ever be prepared for a gunman amidst a crowd of festival goers, no one expects an attack as they dance drunkenly to loud music, or watch a Drag show. But gay pride isn't just about naked boys grinding on a float, it isn't really about that at all. It is about acceptance. It is about pride for being different, for being unique, pride in knowing that just because you're gay, or lesbian, or bisexual, transgender, or gender-queer, that you are still a person. You are not a pervert, or a degenerate, or diseased (...even if you're an STI filled ho…) just because you don't fit into the gender binary of male and female, or like the same sex.

What make's Gay Pride a core of our humanity is also the driving force of hate behind the attacks like these. Little has changed in the forty years since the 1973 arson attack and the attacks today. The same hate and fear fills the radicals, the extremists, the religiously devout. Our pride in our difference drives the hate in those who do not understand and do not want to understand. As the calls for prayers for the dead and injured echo, I can only feel a sense of irony, dark onerous irony, that by some virtue our prayers for their safety will somehow outweigh the prayers for their deaths in some cosmic struggle with a god that doesn't exist.